People down in Alabama are getting all introspective about how their supposedly flawless Christian governor could have turned out to be such a low class fraud. This Wayne Flynt character is interesting because he’s a little put out that it took so long to force Robert Bentley’s resignation:
“Secular culture is eroding evangelicalism to the point where it takes us one full year to get rid of the governor because of all of these conflicting pressures,” [Flynt] said. “He would have been out the door in an hour in the 1940s.”
But he has an explanation for why Bentley survived as long as he did.
“The idea that moral hypocrisy hurts you among evangelical voters is not true, if you’re sound on all of the fundamentals,” said Wayne Flynt, an ordained Baptist minister and one of Alabama’s pre-eminent historians. “Being sound on the fundamentals depends on what the evangelical community has decided the fundamentals have become. At this time, what is fundamental is hating liberals, hating Obama, hating abortion and hating same-sex marriage.”
I went to church as a kid and I learned a lot about trying to love your enemies. I struggle with how to respond to folks who present themselves as morally exemplary and yet project a solid front of hatred.
I also struggle with this tolerance for moral hypocrisy. I think most people instinctively recoil from hypocrisy, but folks who follow the word of Jesus should, I think, be respectful of the fact that the one thing that really seemed to set Jesus off and make him lose his temper was watching hypocrites in action.
I know he was sending another very important message about forgiveness. And I know he told people not to be judgmental. It’s a hard teaching, because he didn’t exactly practice what he preached. He promised to go very rough with the hypocrites:
“Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God?”-Romans 2:3
But I’m not talking in favor of sanctimony. I’m just saying that if Jesus tells you to love your brother maybe you shouldn’t form a culture around hating everyone and everything that makes you a teensy bit uncomfortable.
Robert Bentley turned out to be a giant hypocrite. It’s okay to acknowledge that. It turns out that he wasn’t “sound on all of the fundamentals.” The fact that he hated Obama and liberals and gays doesn’t mean that he was a godly person or a leader worth following.
It’s also okay to hold him responsible for his actions:
“I think he’s just like all of us: He’s made of flesh and bone, and he’s temptable,” said the Rev. John Killian, a former president of the Alabama Baptist State Convention. “I believe it was the devil, and I believe the devil knew he was bagging big game.”
There’s something messed up when, as long you as you hate all the right things and people, you can even be possessed by the devil and get a pass with these folks.
I don’t see how to break through to them. Although I suspect doing a better job of emulating their Savior and meeting their hatred with love is as good a place to start as any.
Aargh!
The evangelicals LOVE sinners, because without sinners, there would be nobody to abase themselves and beg for forgiveness, usually accompanied by handing over some coin to the evangelical preachers. It’s a giant racket.
Boy howdy, hypocrisy is a mainstay with the Republicans. Mitch McConnell has turned it into an art form with the Supreme Court stalemate; that’s his signature piece.
The religious Republicans also show how hypocrisy can be used as a hate tool. Don’t like someone? Challenge their moral and religious background. Target and destroy candidates who defend a woman’s right to choose birth control or abortion. They cling so tightly to their Bibles that they can’t reach out a hand to the needy or the poor, which is ironic, since that’s what Jesus asked them to do.
And then there’s Trump. This is where I go clear into orbit, and it includes Bentley as well. How the smug, judgmental, hateful “christians” can not only tolerate, but enthusiastically support Trump defies every rule in the Good Book. He’s a liar, a cheat, an adulterer, a man who worships money, and he doesn’t attend church. In their scorekeeping, he should have been booted off the list before he even got started in politics. But because he knew how to make promises about banning abortion and is weakening his stance on gay rights, he’s fine with them.
The voters who support Trump and pretend he’s a decent man are delusional. And the rest of us pay the price.
Let me note that my characterization of Christian behavior does not include the true followers of their religion.
Another example here: http://thedailybanter.com/2017/04/conservatives-cant-be-trusted/
And I am not a Justin Rosario fan by any means but he gets this one right.
He cites an Andrew Kaczynski tweet comparing Obama’s Syria strikes in 2013 to Trump’s:
Democrats:
37% support Trump’s Syria strikes
38% supported Obama doing it
GOP:
86% supported Trump doing it
22% supported Obama doing
Rosario: “That 56% swing? That’s what a political movement devoid of core principles looks like. Democrats, on the other hand, were quite consistent. Why? Because the left, for all of our diverse ideologies, actually has a core set of values that we generally don’t jettison when it’s politically convenient.
We all know that once Trump is forced out of office, Republicans voters will immediately feign horror. Perhaps they’ll insist that Trump wasn’t a “real” Republican. Perhaps they’ll say they never voted for him. Perhaps they’ll break out their little tricorner hats again and try to resurrect the Tea Party as a “separate” party from the “corrupt” GOP. It worked for them after Bush and the Republicans left the country in shambles, why not try it again?”
The GOP are world-class grand masters at Strategic Forgettery (® and TM driftglass) and their ability to hold multiple, directly conflicting positions on just about everything makes the Red Queen’s claim to believe ‘seven impossible things before breakfast’ like an achievement a toddler could make.
Aren’t we living a big bout of the eternal clash between… reason and tradition? As ever, reasonable progress appears to provoke powerful reaction.
Muʿtazila – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not reason and tradition.
Change and tradition. In particular, the trend since the 1960s of more clearly asserting the separation of churches and the US state.
I don’t see a reassertion of Thomism in these churches. And the fundamentalist tradition only goes back to the publication a century ago of a Sunday School series called The Fundamentals of the Christian Faith. Evangelicalism, being congregational in its polity has little external reference to what is or is not traditional at any given time. And most of these churches are loosely connectional, if that. So it is possible for really off the wall doctrines to spring up in evangelical local churches and then spread through personal, not connectional networks. But mostly they are now about marketing more than evangelism–advertising, pitching, using all of the modern marketing techniques.
It is really those people still within the Western Enlightenment tradition who have the biggest trouble with evangelicalism in the US.
In a weird way, if you’ve ever heard evangelicals theologize, they are the ones hung up on reason and it verily spins, and their Englightenment liberal/progressive critics are the ones who speak out of a tradition.
The basis is Schopenhauer’s epistemology is that we experience the world (and even ourselves) as representations. Perceptions matter a lot on a society level as well. Whatever are the common judgements, they define social reality. And that is where reactionary traditionalists beat up rationalists, time after time.
The Mutaliza fall is a case in point. It took another two centuries to settle the Islam orthodoxy (as we know it). But the polemic balance was lost quickly, at the hands of sharp-tongued al Ashari and al Maturidi. “Mutaliza” became a derogatory term. Another resemblance to today: economic-ecological problems disfavored the rational Islamists.
Now I am reading the book
Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane
It reminds that the “Arab/Muslim” intellectual golden age was concentrated in Central Asia. Baghdad was surely involved — but from the founding it was greatly influenced by Central Asian cosmopolitanism and economic, cultural, religious, intellectual experiences. There was thus traditional ground for Mutazila — and it continued to have vitality in Central Asia.
Continuous progress (or even survival) of the rational worldview is not a given. There is an argument that Hellenistic Greece was developing the scientific method and applications to a much more sophisticated level than we would expect by chronology.
“He would have been out the door in an hour in the 1940s.”
Hmm. It’s interesting that he chose the era of Film Noir, a time when morally conflicted notable films such as The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon were made.
Mighta lynched him too for good measure. Oh sorrry, no, he’s white.
“He would have been out the door in an hour in the 1940s.”
Fundamentally incorrect, pun intended.
This never would have seen the light of day in 1940. And the rubes would be able to continue worshipping Mammon disguised as Jesus, just the way they like their Christianity.
“People down in Alabama” is a gross characterization. A little fewer than a third are not white and likely to not to be of the type you characterized even if they are evangelicals, about a sixth of all Protestants in Alabama. White evangelical Protestants are about half of the population. One eighth of the population are “nothing in particular”. Only 1% are of non-Christian faiths.
Bentley in 2014 pulled 750,231 votes. The Democratic challenger had 427,787 votes,
It seems that “people down in Alabama” turns out to be less than 20% of the population.
And likely the people who would talk in terms of “secular culture” are an even smaller percentage who are politicized Christians, the products of Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie deciding to pursue the protection of sectarian segregation academies under the banner of “school choice” and linking with the urban ethnic Catholics in throwing up the smoke screen of abortion in order organize and politicizes churches whose members had tended to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Those are only one type of your hypocrites in Southern churches.
The type that is of the smaller number but of more influence until recently in Southern states were the Episcopalian businessmen and lawyers who maintained the corruption in Southern state houses. No doubt these were the stock local “secularists” in Wayne Flynt’s portrayal to his audience. After all, these days it is the members of mainline Protestant denominations in urban areas in the South who are most likely to be driving the country roads with a CoExist sticker on their bumper.
I’m not sure that getting Alabama news and opinion from the New York Times is a wise thing to do.
The Atlanta Journal-Constutition informs me that Gov. Bentley was a top student in his high school and at the University of Alabama and is a trained chemist. Misedumicated–that’s what makes him a secularist. Of only he had gone to Howard College (Samford University) in Homewood, Alabama (a suburb of Birmingham) and then after getting his Ph.D. come back to teach at Samford for years until Auburn hired him. He has written the “authoritative” history of Alabama, which is why the New York Times picked him up to interview. His bibliography cannot be pigeonholed as reflecting this or that viewpoint except he seems to take a populist view of Alabama history. He covers the missionary movement in Talking Christianity to China.
If taken for what they are, some of his books might provide good insight into what makes Alabama politics tick. Too bad too many people can’t take their minds south of the Potomac River. And mentally hunker down for safety in the bicoastal intellectual sanctuaries.
Yes, Republican support from the religious right has been built for 40 years on hypocrisy, and urban Catholics of the “family values” movement have collaborated in that. National evangelicalism, pentecostalism, took “conservative values” (primarily defenses of racial segregation) nationwide during the 1970s and received Catholics as allies because of Catholic interest in parochial schools under any plan of “school choice”. Whipping up anxiety about abortions is what mobilizes this movement. They now are so single-minded about defeating Democrats, liberals, secularists, and other enemies that they will vote for Trump and excuse the corruption of a state governor. They can’t be talked to because, for them, Christianity is a weapon, not a faith. It a trump card in political persuasion, an argument that the policies are incontrovertible because they are the Will of God. If they stand with God, they don’t have to listen.
The fact is, you don’t have to sway these voters to change Alabama politically. You just have to organize a million votes for a candidate for governor and organize them statewide, not in the blue counties. Politicized evangelicals are just a loud large-enough minority who have been socially steamrollering their personal networks for 40 years.
Tarheel,
I’m doing some research on this, I’d like to follow up in more depth. Can you point me toward some sources?
In the 1940s, legislators were not evangelicals in the same sense as today, churches were not as much politicized, the legislature was a men’s club, people were allowed private lives, and affairs only became public if the politician had a vicious conflict with a rival. And there was the expectation that a shamed politician would resign immediately. After Watergate, Republicans became averse to resigning.
There are no Christians. There are only people who identify as Christians because that identification conveys privileges.
Struggle as I might, that won’t fit most of the Christians I know. My parents, for example.
Your diary describes a certain personality type.
——-
There’s something messed up when, as long you as you hate all the right things and people, you can even be possessed by the devil and get a pass with these folks.
——-
It’s what some around here have been using to explain how Trump won. It’s really very simple,
“He hates the same people they hate”
These types (not all Christians) do belong to the group because it’s an identity. That identity allows them to feel hate, express hate, show hate, all while wrapping themselves in a feeling of moral superiority.
They are not followers of Christ.
.
there are actual Christians in America. They badly need to find a way to reclaim their brand from the assholes.
When new ethnic identities emerge, they are just as real as older ones. We’re witnessing another stage in the development of a not-so-new American ethnicity, one without a name yet. It’s not ‘white American straight non-coastal Christian,’ though that describes the majority of the members.
Was it Baldwin who wrote about how slavery–kidnapping, brutalizing, terrorizing, murdering and destroying the culture-of-origin of Africans of various ethnicities–created a new American ethnicity which we called (at best) ‘black,’ and how the non-kidnapped, brutalized, terrorized European-Americans then defined themselves in opposition to ‘black’, which created the then-novel ethnicity of ‘whites,’ who were also formed by slavery and racism (and who also largely lost their cultures-or-origin) even though they weren’t the victims.
There’s nothing new there, I guess. But I suspect that Martin’s ‘Southification of the North’ is another way of describing the spread of this ethnicity.
I guess the TLDR is that American conservatism is an ethnic identity, not a political or religious one. It’s deeply rooted in a very American style of Christianity, but even Christianity will always take a back seat to the identity itself.
Whammo. I think you are on to something.
It is the un-hyphenated Americans who have no single cultural tradition that is traceable because of a three-hundred year long pressure for English Protestant conformity and a lack of family and community history below a certain class. It sees the current establishment in terms of the power of victimhood of those not them.
These are the people when asked what ethnicity they are have melting pot roots and can only come up with “American”. In an age moving toward their minority, they are trying to invent a powerful enough ethnicity to play identity politics when the establishment dumps them.
Modern conservatism always was an ethnic identity from God and Man at Yale to the bolting of the Dixiecrats in 1965. There wasn’t the intensity of anxiety because they saw themselves as the “silent [but powerful] majority”. They have shaped their fate much more over the past 50 years than they care to admit.
After 240 years, “American” has gone from the stereotype assigned by foreign observers to a self-conscious ethnicity that reduces “citizen” to mainly that stereotype. It is not so much “Southernizing” and “nostalgically frontierizing” against the corrupt cities.
Are they “trying to invent” a powerful enough ethnicity to play identity politics with or are they forging or discovering one? My feeling is that however deplorable this is, it’s real. There’s a genuine sense of grievance (which as far as I know, every thriving ethnicity relies upon), in-group signifiers, articles of faith that aren’t amenable to rationality or evidence …
Good point about identity politics, though. I mean, I don’t understand why this is emerging so strongly at this time (I think we’re seeing a new stage, beyond what we saw 50 years ago). I wondered if it took a few generations of living in a homogenous media environment for this new ethnicity to hit critical mass–because before then, countervailing pressures existed. Geography mattered more. People identified more with local identities. You didn’t see pickups in Maine with Confederate flags. But there’s been this long process of deracination that’s overwhelmed the smaller, more specific and local identities and maybe left a void for this larger one?
When you don’t figure out the Republican responsibility for a poor economy and Democrats act like Republicans and don’t make the distinction, it doesn’t matter who to vote for — except for religion says vote for morality. Clinton got people better off. McConnell made sure that Obama wouldn’t.
Deracination is an interesting term to use here. Geography doesn’t matter as much because people have relatives all over the country, a trend that started after World War II and accelerated with national corporate mergers and faster transportation. And those evangelical and pentecostal denominations followed these movements. And the mobility scrambled local origins in a particular area. In many areas of the US now transplants outnumber natives and transplants are from all over.
I feel like you would need a sea change in the religious landscape before you would be able to get through to such voters on political issues. Progressive pastors would need to obtain clout.
It would help if the news and entertainment media would stop automatically equating “Christian” with “fundamentalist idiot”. This is a major reason why the voices of progressive Christians aren’t heard.
Wasn’t Romans written by Paul? And it doesn’t contain any actual words of Jesus?
Yes, but that’s not really a distinction that should matter much to an Evangelical. The admonition against “hypocrisy” is pretty solid in the New Testament, I’d say.
Separating Paul from Jesus in Chritianity is mostly the work of historians, not theologians. Luther comically thought that Paul taught “more clearly” than Christ, haha!
Why would an ecclesiastical (that is bureaucratic) lettet to the church leaders in Rome contain any words of Jesus? A lot of what Paul does is trying to help at handling the predictable crises of church politics. And some not-so-predictable crises for a suppressed religion.
Contextless reading of the books collected in The Bible misses a lot of interesting insights.
The Bible-thumpers are their own worst enemy.
Talk to a Southern Baptist sometime…
They’ll tell you to ignore the Gospels, in favor of Saul of Tarsus.
Many Christians prefer a Christian-torturer to Christ. Which likely has a lot to do with many Christians worshipping Mammon disguised as Christ.
Oh, I think it’s pretty clear that today’s Evangelicals much prefer the law of the Old Testament to the gospel of the New. And the sinner (however spectacularly hypocritical) is “forgiven” if (1) he is a fellow Evangelical (however bogus) and (2) performs the public contrition ritual. It’s all quite nauseating and barbaric.
The Founders had spotted that politics and religion don’t mix too well, and tried to set up a political system that could neutralize religious tribalism by ensuring legal freedom of (and from) religion. That’s now crapped out in many areas of the country (mostly the New Confederacy), where the white Christian majority has quite clearly established a state religion and the government is completely in thrall to one religious tribe. Openly “Christian” politics is now celebrated and endorsed.
One key element of the Dem coalition that is not much talked about are the unbelievers or agnostics. They are actually the fastest growing “religious” group around the world, if I remember correctly the surveys I read in books like Breaking the Spell by Dennett. Of course we can broadly say that rural/exurban America and urban America reflect this key split. It is the unspoken basis of the Evangelical hatred of the Dem party, and its hatred of today’s “secular” America. Of course their spiritual leaders have also comically portrayed Jesus as some sort of bronze age investment banker, promising financial prosperity to believers as well. A theology of Jesus the Tax Cutter and Job Creator, haha. One can see the hands of the plutocrats in all of this.
We are evolving towards a national politics consisting of a rational party and a “religious” party, with the religious party now having the upper hand, thanks to plutocrat funding and investment. We can expect more establishment of that party’s religious beliefs as secular law as the situation progresses, and the 5 conservative activists masquerading as justices are surely not going to be enforcing the Establishment Clause. Indeed, Gorsuch has arrived just in time to provide the key vote allowing members of a religious tribe to violate “lib’rul” law if it offends their (purported/speculative) Christian beliefs.
The Middle East has made clear that a nation state composed of committed religious tribes cannot function. One tribe will not suffer rule by another because they know the rule will be biased. Tribe defeats country. In this we can see our future, with the religious tribe (of sinner Bentley) seeking to (legally) impose their religious beliefs on the dissenting unbelievers. That is what all these ever-multiplying anti-choice laws are all about, after all.
My family is littered with evangelical Christians, and virtually every one of them were, and still are, enthusiastic Trump supporters. And all I can say, after endeavoring to have a number of rational discussions with them to try and understand how they bridge that cosmic gap of hypocrisy that exists in this case, is that there is just too much cognitive dissonance, mental gymnastics and theistic rationalizations going on to ever decipher this. Combine all of that with a healthy dose of 24-7 confirmation bias from all their spiritual leaders and people in religious authority whose opinions they respect and follow, and you have an impenetrable wall that has been constructed through what often has been a lifetime of absorption of what is largely an authoritarian type of worldview. And no one in their lifetime has better encapsulated to them that image and language better than Donald Trump.
As someone who was an evangelical Christian at the time that the religious right came into being and started flexing their political muscle, I am not all surprised that we have reached this point. And we are now seeing an attempt to blend the “mainstream” religious right with the ultra-nationalist and racist alt-right community. And the fact that there is so much crossover between much of their foundational authroiztarian world views, and they both use biblical rationalizations to support it, makes them natural bedfellows.
Sarah Posner had a good article last month which explained a lot of how we have arrived at this scary place, where religion and alt-right politics are becoming synthesized into a dangerous frankenstein monster, with Donald Trump being the magic ingredient which makes it all possible.
That’s a really good article, thanks for the link.
Neither ‘side’ is an ally of progressives. It’s best to never forget that. The ‘good guys’ in that article wave around fetuses at protests. They will only fight against each other after every democrat is gone.
.
Apparently Satan can do God’s work…
This seems a cosmic misunderstanding of “the Devil can quote scripture for his own purpose”, haha.
Yes, that might just be the case. I guess in my mind the question to evangelicals would be, “How do you determine what is the work of Satan and what is the work of God when it comes to politics”?
Is God’s work represented by the spirit of love and humility, which gives the maximum aid and comfort to sentient human beings, and would seem to be the overarching message of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount? Or is it something else?
How can we tell the difference? Biblically speaking, Satan is after all, “The Great Deceiver”!
The New Testament answer to how to tell who was who is “by their fruits”.
What are the fruits of this movement?
They are probably mixed.
After all, Obama’s favorite evangelical, Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, engineered the Daniel Diet, which began working on obesity in his congregation.
But it was very easy to tell during the 1970s which Baptist ministers were with Falwell and which were open to desegregating Southern institutions. And very easy to tell why so many medical specialist became active in the Republican Party after the passage of Medicare.
The problem is that one man’s sweet fruit is another man’s spoiled one. “Fruit” would appear to be subjective, based on one’s personal religious paradigm. In my Southern Baptist church in the 70’s, what many viewed as fruit was part and parcel of what drove me away. I learned to find other ways in life to fill what, at the time, I thought was a spiritual void. As it turns out, the choices I ended up making were the most freeing experience in my life. Someone else’s mileage may vary. Everyone’s personal decision is probably unique in that regard.
“My religion is just Ayn Rand’s philosophy with ceremony and ritual added.” Anton LaVey, Founder, Church of Satan…
“Secular culture is eroding evangelicalism to the point where it takes us one full year to get rid of the governor because of all of these conflicting pressures,” [Flynt] said. “He would have been out the door in an hour in the 1940s.”
LOL!! I know he’s serious but this is so much bullshit. He should have been out the door a year ago. He would have been had he been a Democratic Governor. Given that Alabama is totally controlled by the GOP, this is all on them. Secular culture has nothing to do with it.
It was Reagan’s 11th Commandment. If you want to call that “secular culture” go ahead after you make the proper attribution to Secular Saint Ronnie.
About a year ago I went to a lecture given by Dr. Douglas Leonard. Leonard is an ordained pastor of the Reformed Church in America. He is Executive Director of the Al Amana Centre in Oman, founded by the Reformed Church in America, hence his presence there. The goal of the center is to promote dialogue and understanding between Christians and Muslims. What he had to say is relevant to this discussion.
http://www.alamanacentre.org/
He spent time talking about the roots of religious extremism, specifically in the Middle East. We share many of these underlying conditions in this country.
and several more not directly relevant to our situation (colonialism, failed central government, very large young population). I’d say colonialism is relevant but in a different way. Slavery was part of colonialism, and decimation of the Native Americans could also be considered part of colonialism.
This article on authoritarianism and Trump was published a little over a year ago
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism
“Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force.”
“This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which “activated” authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.”